Architecture & art

Bungalows in National City, Rancho Santa Fe mansions. San Diego’s best Craftsman and Victorians, the ugliness of Pardee homes

When the Bungalows Came to Town I drive down East Plaza Boulevard and at first pass a series of contemporary commercial buildings — a red Monterey-style Boll Weevil restaurant (“Home of the Steerburger!”); a glass, ...

In the years following World War II, the biggest art conversation was about abstraction and what to do with it. The critical center was New York and the artists in question were Pollock, Rothko, de ...

Why no one don’t know nuthin abut music around here Since a large proportion of current high school students graduate unable to speak or write correct English, and with no effective knowledge of history, it ...

No one ogles the industrial vistas of Southern California. Those unsightly realms where giant cranes stipple the skyline. Where ship containers are stacked unemptied of their new Curvy Barbie dolls for Walmart. Where thickets of ...

There’s a an artistic universe squeezed into a little gallery space tucked between a residential home and a tattoo parlor on the eastern edge of North Park. The space is called Teros Gallery, the same ...

Mapplethorpe’s work “moves toward a kind of perfection — it’s just a matter of refining.”

I was 11 or 12 when I befriended an older neighborhood boy who was a fanatical bodybuilder. Johnny pumped iron in the basement and would interrupt any conversation to do handstand pushups against a wall. ...

On December 30, I.B. Long was doing his weekly assessment of graffiti and other maintenance issues along Newport Avenue for the local business association. Long had seen the wire man in the sky attached to ...

Listening station invites you to interpret a Miles Davis tune with paper and pens

San Diego Museum of Art’s Art of Music exhibit welcomes visitors with a giant ceramic auricle and protruding ear trumpet that, upon detecting the voices of passersby, proceeds to emit Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge.” It’s a ...

The Cabrillo National Monument at the southern-most tip of the Point Loma peninsula depicts a towering Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo gazing east over San Diego Bay, where, in 1542, he was the first European explorer to ...

“‘Nobody cares about your shitty arts organization.’ Those were her exact words,” recalls United Artists of San Diego chief executive Tatjana Zogovic, who goes by the name Tasha Zogo. She’s referring to a phone call ...